Linguistics

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Abstract

Modernity and Modernism in the Study of Language Linguistics, like sociology, wears its modernity on its name tag. The term Linguistik is first attested in German in the eighteenth century, then in French as linguistique (1812), and in English as linguistics in 1837, but it took decades to catch on as the designation of an academic field. Most of the early attestations come from American publications, including the writings of the man who is in some respects the first “modern” linguist, William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894), in the 1860s and 1870s. In institutional terms, the Société de Linguistique de Paris was founded in 1864, but university chairs in linguistics were slow to be established in France or any other country. The Linguistic Society of America was founded in 1924, almost seventy years after its French counterpart, and it would take another thirty-five years for the founding of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain in 1959. Linguistics was particularly slow to develop in countries such as the UK where language study remained strongly rooted in the older tradition of philology. What distinguished linguistics from earlier approaches? No single criterion, but a constellation. Unlike philology, it was not bound up with the interpretation of classical or medieval texts; unlike etymology, its principal concern was not the origin of particular words; unlike the grammaire générale tradition of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France (later to be revived by Noam Chomsky), it was not linked to enquiries into logic; unlike the pedagogical grammar tradition, it was not aimed directly at the teaching of the standard language or of classical or modern foreign languages. At the same time, the proponents of modern linguistics did not cut their ties with these more venerable enterprises, but instead asserted dominion over them, based on a claim of scientific authority. This they staked largely on redefining their object of study as the language conceived as a self-contained system, which they approached without value judgments about what aspects of it might be reckoned good or bad. Methodologically modern linguistics was to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, and by the 1950s, the consensus among its practitioners was that “All languages are equally complex.” This is the sort of dogmatic assertion that not only defies empirical investigation into its veracity, but would close investigation down altogether.

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Joseph, J. E. (2017). Linguistics. In Modernism and the Social Sciences: Anglo-American Exchanges, c.1918-1980 (pp. 182–201). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316795514.008

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